title-303446

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 01:21:13 +0100

Simon sat on the stony fence and looked around him. The birds had finished their meals and were weighing down the branches of the ash, and Simon could only think of nothing. His antipathy to the exterior as presented to him was really beginning to burn, and egoism was no salvation without proof. Nietzche wrestled with Berkely, and of course Nitzche won because he was righteously selfish, and Berkely was just righteous. Simon tried to refute it thus as Ben Johnson had once done but it occurred to him the pain in his foot could also have been a projection of his own solitary reality on a narcissistic canvas. The projections weren’t bad at times, the pseudo nurse who bandaged his quasi foot appeared to project very nicely. If the world was a project of Simon’s imagination then he was very talented indeed to project all this, but the cruel irony was there was absolutely no one to share it with. Damn Nietzsche and damn those fat bastard birds.
He began to think he was hungry, but was unable to think he was full. There were limits to his imagination.

Comments

title-303305

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 23:45:48 +0100

Tonight will be my last night as a member of a triad...from now on we drop to 2 staff overnight on the acute mental health unit on which I work... The PCT have decided that they would like to regenerate £45 million please and could they have it by Wednesday? We need an overseeing body for these people, the "people's care trusts" thanks Tone. These used to be quangos when the blue bastards were in the aut seat, but because they are run "by local communities for local communities" they have licence to be complete wazzocks... perhaps the overseeing body could be (eff)OFFPrat or something.

The day has come when women who have paid tax all their adult life have to plead for proper care on national television. The time has come when these people can legally sentence someone to death simply over pieces of paper with "I promise to pay the bearer" written on. Years ago I wrote a piece that cites "The rustle over the beats of hearts" At the time it was youthful nihilistic histrionics but sadly it has been prophetic.

The time has come for anger and indignation, but the world we live in has become so anodine as to not do anything about anything. People only become involved with charities when they are affected by the disease which they are fighting.

The time has come for us to grow up, get a real grip on what is important and leave behind that which isn't. But will it happen? Will it fuck.

Comments

The Calculated Teabag

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 04:29:56 +0100

The Calculated Teabag

When I was little, we were poor. We weren’t particularly deprived of what mattered, good parents saw to that, and it wasn’t the “kids don’t know they’re born” Pythonesque experience (Did those Oxbridge types know enough about poverty to comment on those who did? Talented as they were? Anyway…)

I remember mum diluting evaporated milk for our cornflakes. That doesn’t sound bad, until you’ve tried it but sometimes there was no money for milk. My mum is a nurse and my dad a fireman, so it still seems odd that we had to struggle and get teased by those whose parents had superficial superfluous jobs were practising life’s artifice of the fiscally secure in Massets road in fuck off great houses.

These kids came into school with the latest stuff, great chunks of 70’s kitsch with little red bulbs either strapped to their arm or in their bag for use of reading either time or money. True they had problems lifting their arms to see the time or taking the calculator out of the bag to calculate this weeks pocket money intake, but they were cool…and my mum saved tokens for months, off Winalot packets to buy me a basic pong game for my birthday. The family dog bought my entry into technology.

Thus it was with relish and not a small amount of wonder that around 8 or 9 years ago I bought a box of 80 Tetley teabags. This is not in itself particularly wonderful, unless regarding glory or awe in life are low, or consider the path the tea took from stroppy Americans in Boston harbo(u)r to the four score sachets I held in their innocuous green and white box. (And the relish wasn’t for cheese either.) No the wonder and relish came from the fact that given away on the front was a sleek thin and ultimately disposable calculator. And not a red bulb in sight, none of your diodes mates, whatever next, valves?

Growing up in England the 70's and 80's was a time of transition and stupefying stagnancy. Lots of things started coming down in price in relative terms to the point to the point where you can now buy a computer that 20 years ago the CIA NASA or even MJ12 would have sold both their mothers kidneys (and probably your mother's too) and haggled over her head. For less than £300 which is mad.

No one human needs the amount of computing muscle now available and even big companies struggle to make it work effectively for them. NASA put Armstrong on the moon with calculations worked out on a slide rule and a small amount of putty (OK, Kodak may have mucked the film exposure up, so they may have had to film it in a mock-up, but that merely underlines the point I'm about to make so stop interrupting.) 25 years later they fry hugely expensive shuttles and shuttlenauts for the price of an o-ring and a dodgy contract. So, advance and stagnation.

I have a PC that God would have found handy on His 7 day rush job, but I don't have a jet pack or flying car, cold fusion under the stairs, holidays on Phobos or any number of wonders predicted over the years that we'd have by now. This may be coincidence, ineptitude, or we're constantly being sold faster better cheaper with the promise of something truly new as "jam tomorrow".

However, people may be slowly waking up to this without realising it. There has to be a threshold one meets at some point with technology. I took my son to Pizza Hut for his birthday tea recently, and we ordered a stuffed crust chicken pizza. We got stuffed crust margherita, so when I asked for a discount, say of the drinks I was offered another pizza instead. Not a voucher, but one to take home. How much pizza can a person eat in one go? Has it become the norm to cram and sate the consumer into sheep like submission? Anyway I felt I'd had enough expensive cheese on toast and eventually after pulling the manager's arms off and setting fire to his house (In the Cambridge equivalent of Massets Road I don't doubt) I got my free Pepsis. Not Coke. I prefer Coke but in a dualistic market for fizzy tooth rot, you have to take what you are given. I suspect Pepsi have lost the choice war, and so force their dark, sickly soda seduction on us over the country's bars and restaurant tables. Oh well.

Once you have a computer that does everything you want it too, which in my view was hit when they were able to process at 450mhz a second, about 8 years ago, the retailers can only market the same product, but faster. The same thing is happening with the information highway. Dial-up is so last century, but once you get to the point where broadband can give live video feed at DVD quality what more is there? This is apparently at 3-5mbs. We're rapidly approaching that as the bottom end, but cable companies are muttering about feeds of 24mbs.

When CDs first came out they were hailed as indestructible true hifi. I remember Tomorrow's World's Howard or Kieran attacking Prokofiev with wire wool, but he foiled them by hiding in foil behind acetate, and still sounded beautiful and pure in the studio, but pretty crap through my parent's Radio Rental's Grundig telly. CDs transpired as delicate as the LPs they replaced, as soon as marketing compromised the quality, and deemed not all that good really, sorry for the last 20 years, Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio is here, but you can have the CDs you paid £20 for, free with the Daily Express ok?

The same has happened with DVDs and the upcoming blu-ray and HDTV formats. I'm not sure about you but my peepers and ear'oles can only take and sense so much.

You can only have so much pizza. The sheep are waking up to being sheared. It is time to get off the better faster more remarkable techno thing. I have a car that is more comfy and a good deal faster than my living room, PCs to explore the universe actually and metaphorically, video and audio beyond my sensory abilities to properly and purely appreciate, and information coming down the line faster than I can ever take in. I'm full up, no room for fun-factory ice cream, so stop it. Concentrate on the cold fusion thing under the stairs, but don't worry about making evaporated milk work on cornflakes. It doesn't.

Dreams of the £1 note

title-303446

title-303305

The Calculated Teabag

Romeo Had Juliette